There is an old saying which I think is largely true:  He who lives by the crystal ball eats lots of broken glass.  Certainly predicting the future is difficult for those without the divine revelatory skills of Joseph or Daniel in the Bible.  Yet, there is another saying which also has a lot of truth embedded in it:  History doesn’t repeat itself, it rhymes.  Or as it says in Ecclesiastes, there is nothing new under the sun.

So, here is my prediction based on my years of observing the political scene:  If the Republicans win the Senate, expect Mr. Obama to be savaged in the subsequent year–not by Republicans, but by the base of the liberal Democratic Party.  You are already seeing the turn made:  Red state Democrats are given free reign to attack the president’s policies, and in the press, former supporters are making personal attacks, saying Mr. Obama himself is a failure.   Democratic candidates will continue to avoid distancing themselves too much from Mr. Obama, because they know they need his help in turning out the base–especially the African-American community.  But the rest of the base will turn on Mr. Obama out of necessity.  Why?  Because unless the direction of the country and economy and the world change significantly for the better, that centrist middle which defines the median voter (the deciding voter in many political science models) has to ask why the world is going awry, and leadership will be blamed.  There are then only two possibilities:  either Mr. Obama is a failure, or his policies are a failure (or some combination of both).  The liberal base cannot psychologically confront the idea that their own pet issues are the cause of the failure, and perhaps they’re right in an individual sense:  its not any one particular pet issue (such as opposition to the Keystone Pipeline) that drags America down, but rather the combined effect of many bad policies.  Therefore, when the entire country knows that we’re going in the wrong direction, and that 8 years later it will be impossible to blame Mr. Bush, they must blame Mr. Obama personally.  Of course we’ve seen this before; after all, how many American socialists still believe that communism hasn’t failed, it just wasn’t tried correctly?  It had the wrong people running it…if we just had the right leaders it would work, or so they believe.  In the current case, it wasn’t liberalism that failed–it was the “isolated, detached” leadership of Mr. Obama that led to the failure.  Expect this argument to be made with increasing force and vitriol, but perhaps surprisingly, not by Republicans but by Democrats.

In fact, if this is correct, Republican strategists must quickly cease linking Democrats to Mr. Obama, but instead paint the linkage to the Democratic policies.  They must make the case that the current bad results are the inexorable result of the policy choices that were made, and were not the result of one man’s failure.  If Democrats are successful post-2014 election cycle in turning on Mr. Obama, it won’t be effective for Republicans to talk about how bad he is/was. Democrats will agree, but say he isn’t running anymore, and his policies weren’t the problem, he was, “so vote for those great Obama policies but without the detached leadership–we’ll finally get it done if you put the right leadership (me) in.”  Ultimately, the Republicans must win the war of ideas, not the battle of personalities.

What could change this?  Well, if the Republicans don’t win the Senate and Mr. Obama isn’t a total lame duck, this will likely be muted to some degree.  Or, the world may suddenly get better…but if I’m right that the current policies have contributed to the current results, this seems unlikely.

What do you think?

EDIT:  Lots more coming out today on this same basic topic, see here with Barak Obama:  the end of a love affair

EDIT II:  Peggy Noonan writes a scathing report on Mr. Panetta in today’s WSJ on his memoir, and her concluding line also strikes a similar theme (why Panetta wrote his attacks on Mr Obama):

Some say he wrote the book to help detach Hillary Clinton ’s fortunes from those of Mr. Obama. Maybe, but Mr. Panetta is savvy, shrewd and quick to see where things are going. I suspect he’s trying to detach his entire party’s fortunes from Mr. Obama. Reading this book and considering its timing, you get the impression that’s the real worthy battle on his mind.